Prison Life Is All Around for a Girl
Growing Up in Downtown Baltimore

By JONATHAN KAUFMAN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

BALTIMORE -- A few hours before her karate lesson, 10-year-old Sabrina Branch is rambling through her neighborhood. She passes her favorite pizza place, the convenience store where she buys cherry Pepsi slushes, the barber shop where she walks her little brothers to get haircuts.

Then she points to a modern brick building encircled by barbed wire: a state prison. "That's where my Uncle Tony was," she says. She cranes her neck and points across the street to a soot-gray building dotted with Gothic turrets: the city jail. "That's where my dad lived."

This is Sabrina's world, where prison is embedded in the fabric of daily life. The sixth-grader lives 10 minutes from renowned Johns Hopkins University, but her friends and family are more familiar with what some call "Eager Street University" -- this four-square-block incarceration complex a mile away.

Next to the city jail is the state penitentiary, which houses Death Row. Around the corner are two new, high-security prisons. Within the complex, drivers hunt for parking spaces, while on the sidewalks, knots of people shout up to jail cells, asking for their friends. The prisoners yell back, their responses lost in the echoes that bounce off the jailhouse walls. Visiting families wait in long lines, but some are turned back by a sign that reads, "No school age children between the hours of 10 a.m. and 1:45 p.m."

As the prisons flow into the neighborhood, so does the neighborhood flow into the prisons. In Baltimore, more than half of black men age 18 to 34 are tethered to the criminal-justice system -- behind bars, on probation or being sought on a warrant. Nationwide, a black man's chances of being locked up during his life are greater than one in four.

The surge in imprisonment -- of whites and blacks -- is a result of deliberate choices America made over the past two decades. Legislators toughened sentencing guidelines, particularly for drug-related offenses, and scaled back parole. To accommodate so many inmates, states spent billions to build more prisons.

All of those new jailhouse cells have made a difference. Crime has plummeted widely, in part because so many lawbreakers are behind bars. In Sabrina's part of Baltimore, major crime is down 33% over the past three years.

But the prison boom also has transformed many of America's impoverished black neighborhoods, in ways no one fully predicted and few living outside these communities can fully imagine.

The changes reach everywhere. A small Philadelphia company now produces a line of greeting cards for inmates and their loved ones. "Thinking of you," reads one card, picturing a young black couple embracing. "Love transcends prison walls. It stands the test of time."

So many blacks have been imprisoned that it has become a factor in elections. Nationwide, about 13% of black men are ineligible to vote because of their criminal records, according to recent research.

In Baltimore, the state recently assigned probation officers to 11 schools where as many as 40% of the students have already served time somewhere, in the hope that the officers can help, and control, the students better than teachers.

Still, as common an experience as prison has become, it is not always tolerated or accepted -- not by the families trying to escape the vortex of prison life, and especially not by a wise but innocent young girl who idolizes her father.

Dreams and Reality

For years, Vernon Branch has veered in and out of Sabrina's life, occasionally stopping by her grandmother's house, where she lives, or in front of her school after classes ended. When she would ask her dad where he had been, she would invariably get a vague answer. I've been busy with a new job, he'd say. I'll call you when I can.

Then, earlier this year, she received a handwritten letter. "Dear Sabrina," it read. "I'm sorry I haven't been able to visit you, but I have been incarcerated. I'm sorry I didn't write to you before, but I wanted to wait until I knew when I would be getting out of jail. I will come to visit you as soon as I am released. I love you. Daddy."

After reading the letter, Sabrina burst into tears. "I just assumed he was looking for work or trying to get off drugs," she says. "I always felt that if I really wanted him to come on a class trip, I could call him and he would."

To anyone other than an adoring child, the letter wouldn't have come as such a surprise. Her father, 30, had been locked up before, as had her mother. A cousin was on home detention. Many of her friends have a father or brother behind bars.

Valmaree Williams has taken care of her granddaughter, Sabrina Branch, for years, and has tried to provide her a protective shield.

But for most of her life, Sabrina has had to balance the ordinary routines of childhood with the extraordinary circumstances of her family and neighborhood.

Sabrina likes basketball and "Goosebumps" mystery books. When she grows up, she wants to be a lawyer or a basketball player. For her birthday, she dreams of inviting six friends over for a pajama party.

Sabrina also has seen her mother smoke a crack pipe, and she once hid in her underwear her grandmother's $3 allowance so her mother couldn't steal it. She worries that the police may come after her someday; her mother was arrested recently and told authorities that her name was Sabrina. When her mom missed a court appearance, authorities called Sabrina's house, looking for her mother by that name.

'Creepy Crawlers'

Sabrina and her three brothers have been under the care of Mr. Branch's mother-in-law, Valmaree Williams, almost all their lives. Several years ago, Sabrina and the boys spent a few nights in their parents' apartment. There was little food. Strange people came in and out. Cockroaches as big as Sabrina's thumb -- "creepy crawlers," her brother called them -- scuttled across the floor. But Sabrina and her brothers kept going back until their grandmother decided to put a stop to it. "Kids don't see the right or wrong in parents," says Mrs. Williams. "They just want to see them."

Over the years, however, Sabrina grew suspicious of her mother. Last Christmas, shortly before her dad's letter arrived, Sabrina's mother was arrested for allegedly stealing a pair of earrings from Sabrina's grandmother and then smashing the window of a car.

Sabrina invokes a very different image of her father, who would sometimes take her out for pizza after school, or drive her to visit Aunt Linda at her office downtown. When her dad didn't call or visit, her grandmother would deftly deflect questions about his whereabouts, never telling Sabrina that he was locked up. "My father had always been more trustworthy than my mother," Sabrina says. "He kept his word." That's why his letter telling Sabrina that he had been incarcerated was so devastating.

Not that prison life hasn't intruded into the lives of her peers. Her Barclay School, a public school that serves children from kindergarten through eighth grade, bans students from wearing pants without belts in the loops -- an imitation of prison fashion. The principal keeps swatches of rope in a desk drawer to hand out to boys whose pants sag off their hips.

Seven of the 15 students gathered in Sabrina's math class one afternoon have fathers who have been in prison. One boy's father died in prison. A girl says she regularly visits the local jail with her older sister who is visiting her boyfriend.

Near the front of the class, a youngster named Giles announces proudly that no one in his family is in jail. Several classmates roll their eyes and hoot. "The neighbors make fun of us because we're all trying to do the right thing," he says. "They call us a 'punk' family."

At the back of the class, Belinda Lane, the teacher, is stunned. "I never knew so many of the kids had relatives in prison," says Ms. Lane, whose own nephew was just released from jail. "We never have time to talk about it."

Sabrina doesn't mention her dad's record. "It upsets me," she says. "When I think about it, that's a really bad day for me."

Plans to Get a Job

Her sadness vanishes, however, when her dad shows up after school one afternoon after his release. Mr. Branch takes Sabrina and her brothers out for a snack and to an arcade. He says he plans to get a job and will see them again as soon as he finds an apartment.

Happy but wary, Sabrina warns him as he leaves: "Don't make promises you can't keep."

Mr. Branch's life has swerved erratically between hope and disappointment. As a teenager he dropped out of high school, drawn to the easy money of the drug business. Then he straightened out, got a diploma and attended community college for a year. At 20, he married and joined the Army. But after his discharge, he began using drugs again. He was arrested for carrying a handgun, then for assaulting someone in a drug deal. Both times he got probation. Arrested again for assault in 1996, he was sent to the jail on Eager Street.

Mr. Branch had been there before -- in 1980, as a 12-year-old participating in a Scared Straight program that takes at-risk youths for brief visits to jails. Back then, the burly prisoners and their stories of brutality unnerved him. "You won't find me here," he recalls thinking.

But when he arrived as an inmate, the reality wasn't so terrifying. Old pals greeted him. New prisoners called out the names of their streets and neighborhoods -- "Jefferson Street!" "West Baltimore!" -- to find friends from the same part of town.

At night, Mr. Branch called pay phones at his old corner hangouts to chat with friends. Drug-dealing buddies on the outside sent him money orders and visited him to buoy his spirits. "Now I know why there are so many new jails around here," Mr. Branch recalls thinking. "It was like being back in the neighborhood. Everybody you didn't see on the street, they were locked up. At first I was scared. But then I said, 'Man, I'm home.' "

A Lack of Fear

Veteran prisoners say they are amazed by the attitudes of new inmates. "The younger guys take it for a joke," says Tony King, who just finished serving seven years for dealing cocaine. "They're not scared. They look at it as a resting period."

The changes have produced unpleasant surprises. Last spring, East Baltimore Youth Services took a group of boys and girls, age 12 to 15, on a Scared Straight program to a prison work camp for teenagers. As the students entered the grounds, inmates leaned out from the barracks and began to shout. Several of the visiting boys and girls waved back. They recognized friends and relatives.

"Ignore them," said Donna Brown, the counselor accompanying the visitors.

"But we know them," one of the girls responded. "Can we go visit them?"

"I was shocked," Ms. Brown said later. "If I had ever visited a place like that when I was a child, I would have been too scared to speak."

Prison sometimes takes care of the inmates in ways that they can't, or won't, take care of themselves. It feeds them regularly, it gives them a chance to get regular exercise, and it may enable or force them to quit drugs. As a result, men often come out of prison looking far better than when they went in. "You hear women say all the time, 'Hey, you look good. Did you just get out of prison?' " says Richard Mosley, a former jail guard who now works with Baltimore community groups.

When he was first locked up in 1996, Mr. Branch went through drug withdrawal and stayed clean. But when he was released, he says, he began using heroin again and was soon dealing up to 18 hours a day, making nearly $1,000 a week, then spending most of it to support his habit. He, too, came to look upon his stints behind bars as a respite. "Sometimes you want to go to jail," he says. "You just think, 'Man, I need a break.' "

Twice in 1997, Mr. Branch was arrested for drug dealing, pleaded guilty to lesser possession charges, and served sentences of several months each time. By November, when authorities learned that he had violated his probation, a judge sent him to jail again and warned him that the next time, he could get five to 15 years. That scared him, he says. "Nothing is worth five to 15 years gone," he says. "I wanted to get my life together."

When Mr. Branch is released from Eager Street in February, he heads to his mother's house. But he is largely on his own. While prison construction has soared, money for job training and education inside prison has shrunk.

Life on the Outside

He begins his life on the outside by applying for a few warehouse and delivery jobs. His criminal record is an obstacle. He attends a night meeting at The Men's Center, which offers job counseling to former prisoners. But the group has no jobs right away, and Mr. Branch doesn't bother going back.

A few days later, he runs into a fellow ex-inmate who is working for the city, picking up trash. The man is using a day off to deal drugs.

"You have a city job, and you're out here hustling," says Mr. Branch, amazed.

"This is where the money is," says the man.

"You're crazy," says Mr. Branch. "Man, I'd die for a city job."

Soon, however, Mr. Branch falls into his old habits. He runs into an old girlfriend -- a heroin addict with whom he fathered a son he hardly knows -- and moves into her row house. The back windows are boarded with plywood. There is no telephone, and the gas and electricity have been shut off. A stream of men come and go. One just violated his probation, another was just released from jail. "Everybody you see has been in prison at least once or twice," says Mr. Branch.

Mr. Branch brings Sabrina and her brothers to stay for a weekend. They treat it as a big adventure. Sabrina plays hide and seek in the darkened house and visits his girlfriend's mother, who braids her hair. Mr. Branch tells Sabrina he is looking for a job and hoping to find a house in a better neighborhood. Sabrina is proud. "I know he's not into drugs like my mother is," she says. "I know he's doing the right thing."

Soon, however, Mr. Branch stops calling Sabrina or having her visit. He is using heroin again. To support his habit, he deals drugs once a week, trying to avoid Tuesdays and Thursdays when, he says, police patrol heavily. Looking through the want ads, he calls a few places and lies about his record. Two warehouses invite him for interviews, but Mr. Branch doesn't go. At a time when he is dealing heroin, he says he can't afford the bus fare.

As Mr. Branch sinks, so does Sabrina. She begins talking back to teachers and getting into fights. Her test scores fall. "She has an apathetic attitude," says Ms. Lane, her math teacher. "She's given up."

Clinging to an Explanation

Sabrina clings to the explanation her father usually gives her for his absences. "I think he has a job," she says. "I think he's doing better than he was."

To some, that seems like a noble defense. "Sabrina is wise enough to know what is going on in her family," says Gertrude Williams, the school's recently retired principal who has known Sabrina since she was six. "Sabrina thinks she's going to have to go to jail. A lot of kids think that -- my father went in, my mother went in. But Sabrina doesn't have to go."

And sometimes, Sabrina exudes confidence about her future. "I'm not going to jail," she says. "I'm going to make something out of my life, go to college, whatever it takes."

But at other times, she is overcome by the present. One day, she and her grandmother go to the courthouse to straighten out some administrative issues involving her guardianship. She passes a group of women prisoners being herded away.

"I saw all these women, they were walking through the hallway with shackles," says Sabrina, back in her grandmother's tidy living room. "It made me think, is that going to be my mother? Or my aunt? It could be any one of my relatives. Who will be next?"

Sabrina's grandmother is a sturdy, spirited woman of 48. She keeps an immaculate house: Her living-room furniture is protected with plastic covers. Her shelves are filled with glass animals and knickknacks. From a basement window that fronts the street, Mrs. Williams sells candy and slush cones to neighborhood children.

She wakes up at 5 a.m. to get the four children off to school, then leaves for her job as a home health aide for elderly patients. She arranges her schedule so she can be home by 4 p.m. to help the kids with their homework and make sure they do their chores. She often relies on Sabrina to walk the boys, ages five to nine, back from school or get them haircuts. "Sometimes I worry that I'm depriving her of her childhood," Mrs. Williams says.

She sends a clear message to her grandchildren about right and wrong. "I tell them, 'Just because your mom does this or your pop does this, you don't have to be like that. I don't do these things. You can be like me.' "

Despite her strong will, the burden is so great that she sometimes breaks down in tears. "I feel overwhelmed," she says. "I can't share what's going on with a lot of people. I've struggled so hard to keep this family intact. But when the sadness comes in Sabrina's face, I can't change that."

Twenty years ago, when she and her husband bought this row house, she could name the handful of families on her street with relatives "in trouble." Now, she estimates, more than half of the families have someone in jail. Most of the young men her daughter grew up with disappear for a year or so behind bars, then reappear on a drug-dealing corner a few blocks away. "Prison doesn't scare them," she says. "Some act as if they're almost proud to go." She scoffs at statistics that show her neighborhood is safer.

Mrs. Williams rarely hears from Sabrina's mother, whom she considers incorrigible. Her daughter has no fixed address, and efforts to reach her at the last place she lived were unsuccessful.

As for Sabrina's father, Mrs. Williams calls him a "jailbird" and adds: "Some people are just born to fall downhill." At the same time, she wonders if her son-in-law might have turned out better if he had enrolled in a drug-treatment program early on instead of landing in jail. Like most cities, Baltimore has a chronic shortage of such programs, with room for only 15,000 of its estimated 60,000 addicts.

Mrs. Williams knew of Mr. Branch's stints in jail. But she didn't tell her grandchildren or contradict their father's untruthful reasons for his absences because she didn't want to "bring bad news in the house," she says. "I want them to make their own choices, to see there are possibilities, that a better way is open to them. I don't want to take away their hope."

Striving for Role Models

She strives to provide role models for her grandchildren by having a friend who is a college professor come by to visit, along with a local handyman, and her ex-husband, the children's grandfather, who drives a tractor-trailer. One evening, one of the kids' favorite relatives comes by -- their cousin Tony King, whom Sabrina calls "Uncle Tony." Sabrina and the other children hug him as he enters the living room. But it's a brief visit. Mr. King pulls up a pants leg. He is "on the box" -- a beeper-sized monitoring device strapped to his ankle -- after serving seven years for drug dealing. He has to rush home to check in with probation authorities.

Across town, Mr. Branch's mother, Betty Williams, sits slumped in a chair in an apartment in a soon-to-be torn-down housing project. She has become accustomed to her son's jail sentences, even bringing her youngest son, who is nine, along to visit his big brother behind bars. But now she has an extra burden.

While Mr. Branch was jailed the last time, his 17-year-old sister was sentenced to six months for a stabbing. Mrs. Williams, 53, now has custody of her two-year-old granddaughter.

She doesn't quite know how to cope with it. She is a churchgoing woman; her answering machine picks up with a message, "Praise the Lord." She remembers life before crime, and punishment, transformed her neighborhood. Growing up in North Carolina, "I didn't know anything about prison," she says. Now, "it's like I'm serving time." When her daughter was in jail, she says, she visited "almost every day. But no one ever visited me and the baby."

And she is still chilled by the memory of the first time she saw her son at the Eager Street jail.

"I walked into the waiting room, a steel door slammed -- it was like something went through me. I wanted to run out."

Sometimes she wonders if she is responsible for her children's troubles. Then she corrects herself. "What did I do? I told all of them, 'If you go there for doing wrong, don't look for me to bail you out.' "

Mr. Branch's release disrupts her life, too. A few days after he leaves jail, he shows up with glazed eyes -- a sign, she knows, that he is using drugs. She confronts him, but he shakes his head, "No, no, no. Don't start preaching." Soon after, he moves out.

"I love him. I love him to death" she says. "But if I don't tell my children what's right, they'll think wrong is right."

Her frustration is shared throughout the city's poorest neighborhoods. William Wells has been coaching basketball leagues at the Madison Square Recreation Center for 29 years. He is so respected that drug dealers avoid the streets bordering his courts. Now, however, almost half his players have relatives in prison, and several have done time themselves.

One hot afternoon, a 20-year-old shoots baskets on an outdoor court. He is wearing long pants so no one will see the monitoring device strapped to his ankle. An 11-year-old tossing layups is wearing a T-shirt from Courtside Bail Bonds, featuring a silhouette of a man behind bars.

Upstairs in a meeting room, Harold Richard, 14, sits with some friends and calmly ticks off the people he knows who have served time. "My father," he begins in a soft monotone. "My mother. Both my uncles. My cousin." Around the table, other boys chime in: An 11-year-old has an uncle just imprisoned for theft; another visited his mother in prison last week.

Derrick Ross, 15, is waiting for his favorite uncle to be released in two weeks. His father and several cousins have also served time. Still, he declares, "I'm never going to prison." His twin brother, Eric, interrupts him: "Never say never."

A decade ago, Coach Wells took some of his teenage teams to a nearby prison so their fathers and brothers could see them play. He no longer goes, because so many of the players he once coached are now inmates there. "I had assumed they'd done well, gone away to college," he says. "But there they were, in jail. I put my heart and soul and mind into them, and they're in there."

A Mix of Emotions

At the storefront Nazarene Temple, pastor Allan Fleet feels a mix of anger and powerlessness. "I was an addict in 1974, but I never served any time. God was good to me," he says. "I was given a second chance, and I took it. But today there are individuals who will not go out and work. The opportunity is here. We have more jobs available than we ever had."

At the same time, he wonders how it got this far. "I look around now at all the men going to prison and I say, 'Could we have done more?' "

The day Mr. Branch was released, he headed to his mother's home and stole some pants and a hat from his kid brother. It was, for 19-year-old Gregory Branch, just another confirmation of how jail has changed Vernon. "He's become hard," says Gregory. "I would have given the pants to him if he had just asked."

The two have little in common. Gregory, a high-school graduate, gets up at 4 a.m. most days to work the cash register at a local convenience store for $5.60 an hour; in the evenings, he hauls boxes in a warehouse for $5.75 an hour. He is trying to save money for a used car because if he can learn how to drive, he could get a delivery job that pays $10 an hour. He gives his mother $100 a week.

He has had one scrape with the law: At 13, he got caught sneaking into someone's pool. Still, says Gregory, living the straight life takes an enormous amount of strength and luck. "If I were to lose both my jobs and I didn't have any money, I would be doing the same thing as Vernon," he says. His brother, he says, "is just trying to survive."

Another brother, Glen, now 32, left home at 17 -- in large part to avoid the temptations that swallowed Vernon. As a teenager, he was arrested for car theft. He was in jail for only a few hours before his mother bailed him out, but it was enough to shake him up.

"I didn't like being locked up," he says. "There were too many things I wanted to do."

When he was 19, he met Darlene Ferguson, who has seen all four of her brothers go to jail. "We were trying to escape the same thing," she says.

They are now raising their two children, 10 and 7. Three years ago, the couple saved enough money to move to a slightly better neighborhood. They work split shifts so someone is always with the children. Ms. Ferguson's work day starts at 4 a.m.; she is a dietary aide in a nursing home, earning about $8 an hour. Glen makes $6 an hour on the night shift as a short-order cook at a Friendly's restaurant.

Glen says he hasn't seen Vernon since he was released and doesn't wish to. The last time he invited his brother over to his house, Vernon stole a tape deck. Glen's children don't ask about Uncle Vernon, but their 10-year-old daughter recently asked about another uncle -- Ms. Ferguson's brother -- who just went back to prison.

'We Don't Hide It'

"I told her the truth," says Ms. Ferguson. "I said he did something he wasn't supposed to do, and he's paying for that. I said when you do bad things like that, you go to jail. We don't hide it. She knows."

Linda Branch, Vernon's sister

Even as he spirals downhill, Mr. Branch yearns to help his sister Linda, 33. She is the most successful member of the family. She graduated from high school and has worked steadily ever since, now as a receptionist and office manager at a property-management company. A single mother, she decided last year to rent an apartment in Woodlawn, Md., a middle-class suburb, so her 15-year-old son Chris -- who was getting into trouble for shoplifting and truancy -- could attend a better school. At night she takes algebra and English classes at a community college.

For all the distance she created, though, she too has been drawn to prison life.

She is dating an inmate.

It began four years ago when her mailman told her he had a brother in prison who would appreciate a letter. Ms. Branch began writing to Shane Ransom, and their relationship blossomed. She occasionally sent him $25 checks and visited him at the state prison in Jessup, Md., 45 minutes away. They talk by phone every week, often for several hours on Friday nights, when Mr. Ransom calls collect.

Vernon Branch is enraged. "He's just conning her, using her to get some money," he says. He used to do the same thing, he tells her, when he was in prison.

Ms. Branch says she, too, wonders why she "messes with someone in prison." Her answer: "There are fewer men. The ones you have out there now -- if they're not married or incarcerated, they're gay." Her boyfriend "says a lot of positive things, things I want to hear. Sometimes I think I'm crazy for seeing Shane, but he fills a void in my life."

Ms. Branch also acknowledges that going out with a prisoner gives her a sense of control: "I don't have to commit myself." She dates other men.

On a Sunday morning, Ms. Branch sits across from Mr. Ransom in the waiting room of the penitentiary, separated by a wide table and waist-high divider. They can hug and kiss briefly, but no more.

Mr. Ransom is muscular, clear-eyed, with a neatly trimmed beard. He brims with sincerity.

"We've had lots of time to know each other and build trust and a love different than physical love," says Mr. Ransom, 39. "It's something greater than we could ever imagine. People say, 'Why would a woman deal with a man in prison?' It's love, respect, honesty and truth. Oftentimes, they don't find that on the street."

He turns to Ms. Branch. "It's like I'm in the merchant marine, or I've been drafted into the Army."

That is too much for Ms. Branch, who rolls her eyes.

Life on the Outside

In the past year, since she moved to the suburbs, she has stopped sending Mr. Ransom money; she needs it for the higher rent. Mr. Ransom presses Ms. Branch to marry him, but she demurs. "I'm not going to let him just move in with me and my son," she says. "I don't know what he is going to be like on the outside."

In fact, she doesn't fully know what he is like now, for Mr. Ransom hasn't been candid with her. He told her four years ago that he would be out in a year, she says. Actually, he has served only five years of a 20-year sentence for distributing heroin, and faces an additional nine years for robbery.

Sometimes, Ms. Branch brings her son along for a prison visit so Mr. Ransom can give Chris advice. One Sunday, she tells her boyfriend that Chris went into the city for a party the previous night and didn't return home until 5:30 a.m.

Mr. Ransom lectures Chris about how he should listen to his mother. But the teenager is uncomfortable and bored. He hates these visits. "It's not going to change me," says Chris: "I don't want to go to prison, but it may come down to it."

Some who know the Branch family think Linda is making a mistake taking Chris to see a prisoner. "It's like you're condoning it," says Gertrude Williams, the school principal. "Why move out to the suburbs and bring along the same problems as in the city? We need to get over this sense that prison is all right."

By early August, five months after his release, Mr. Branch is dealing heroin full time. "I tried to make it work," he says. "But you do what you have to do." He is resigned to the idea that he'll wind up behind bars again. "Anybody can do the time once you get there."

He makes a last-ditch attempt to go straight, hunting out the drug-treatment program at Israel Baptist Church. There is at least a weeklong wait, and he doesn't go back.

Late one afternoon, he sees his mother-in-law driving by and flags her down. He asks about his children and promises to visit soon.

Several days later, on Aug. 14, Mr. Branch is arrested and held on a drug charge. From jail, he calls his mother, but not his mother-in-law or his children. "I'm not going to tell Sabrina," he says from behind a grate in jail. "I love her. I don't want to hurt her. She told me it makes her mad."

But a few weeks later, Sabrina is visiting Betty Williams, Vernon's mother. Her grandmother is in the kitchen cooking and asks Sabrina about her dad.

"Have you seen your father? Has he called?" she asks, unaware that Sabrina hasn't been told where he is.

Sabrina looks at her eagerly. "Do you know where he is, his address?"

"Well, he's locked up."

Sabrina looks surprised, but says nothing. She quickly goes off to play with her cousins. Later she comes up with her own theory: "I think he moved to a new house like he said he was going to, but he doesn't have transportation to get over here."

She just wishes she had her dad's new address. If she did, she would write him a letter. She imagines what she would tell him: "Where have you been? It's been a long time. I haven't seen you. My birthday is coming up. If you have some free time on Friday when school is over, could you come by and pick me up?"

Back home, Sabrina eagerly awaits her birthday. On the calendar in the kitchen, her big day is marked not with party plans, but with a line that says, "Tony free!" It's the date her cousin can remove his monitoring device.

On the morning Sabrina turns 11, her brothers burst into her room and give her 11 "birthday licks" -- playful punches on her arm. Her grandmother gives her a pair of earrings and a ring with her birthstone -- a tiny sapphire. That evening, Mrs. Williams drives Sabrina and a girlfriend to see a movie. Her father, awaiting trial, doesn't call.

A week later, Valmaree Williams decides to confront Sabrina directly.

With a house full of children, it's difficult to find a private moment. So one evening, as they are about to drive to Sabrina's karate lesson, Mrs. Williams turns to her granddaughter in the front seat.

"You know your father is in jail again," she says softly.

Sabrina stares straight ahead. "No, he's not," she says.

"Yes, he is," says Mrs. Williams.

The two don't talk about it for the rest of the night; Sabrina wants to focus on her efforts to get a yellow belt.

But over the next few days, Sabrina has problems in class, talking back to teachers. The school calls Mrs. Williams.

"I'm sorry now I told her," her grandmother says. "All hope had left her that her mother will be there for her, but it hadn't left her about her father."

For Sabrina, the truth about her father's return to jail is no comfort. "I feel like it's just going to happen again and again," she says. "I feel like I've lost him."